Many professionals and students in engineering science business and other application fields need to develop Windows-based and web-enabled information systems to store and use data for decision support without help from professional programmers However few books are available to train professionals and students who are not professional programmers to develop these information systems Developing Windows-Based and Web-Enabled Information Systems fills this gap providing a self-contained easy-to-understand and well-illustrated text that explores current concepts methods and software tools for developing Windows-based and web-enabled information systems Written in an easily accessible style the book details current concepts methods and software tools for Windows-based and web-enabled information systems that store and use data It is self-contained with easy-to-understand small examples to walk through concepts and implementation details along with large-scale case studies The book describes data modeling methods including entity relationship modeling relational modeling and normalization and object-oriented data modeling to develop data models of a database The author covers how to use software tools in the Microsoft application development environment including Microsoft Access MySQL SQL Visual Studio Visual Basic VBA HTML and XML to implement databases and develop Windows-based and web-enabled applications with the database graphical user interface and program components The book takes you through the entire process of developing a computer and network application for an information system highlighting concepts and operation details In each chapter small data examples are used to manually walk through concepts and operational details These features and more give you the conceptual understanding and practical skill required even if you don t have a computer science background to develop Windows-based or web-enabled applications

In GUI Bloopers, consultant Jeff Johnson uses 550+ pages to illustrate common pitfalls in user interface design, the all-important iceberg tip that end users confuse with applications and that developers confuse with end users. Reporting on 82 incidents of bad design, Johnson manages to cover the essential point of his message: software designers should think of their user interfaces from the user’s point of view. Not profound, but profoundly overlooked in most low-end to mid-range development efforts. His codification of GUI design in eight predictable principles will help GUI newbies realize that the customer must be pleased with the product. Of course, the customer doesn’t always understand what he or she wants. Hence, GUI development is iterative. When the customer is not at hand, a surrogate will do, so usability testing is essential. The bloopers include mistakes in window design, labeling consistency, visual/grammatical parallel construction, coherence of look and feel, and clarity. Most perceptively, Johnson observes that CPU speed in the development group hides many design mistakes. Moreover, context-scoping, already a subtle problem in software design, must be implemented in GUI design. Input error handling is the most psychologically sensitive of all GUI design characteristics. User error messages can easily be too vague or too specific, and diagnostic error messages should be user-manageable, if not actually user-interpretable. Like the Hollywood outtakes that gave us the "blooper," the entertainment quotient here is measured in mistakes, not successes. Teaching by counter example rather than by example at an estimated ratio of three to one, Johnson panders to our invertebrate instinct to measure our own successes by someone else’s failure. To his credit, he recognizes that user interfaces include pedestrian texts (like his) as well as graphical interfaces for computer applications. His self-referential style gives the book an egocentric slant, but he is both priest and practitioner: he submitted a draft to usability testers and reports the results in an appendix. One criticism was that there were too many negative examples. Hmmm. Thanks to other tester comments, GUI Bloopers is a browsable book, allowing the few nuggets of wisdom to be located. For the most part, the book’s value can be captured by reading the seven-page table of contents carefully. –Peter Leopold